Toys

With a big cast of characters, colorful scenery, fairly clever joke writing, and pick-up and play gameplay, Skylanders: Imaginators feels like a playable Saturday morning cartoon where you can insert your own hero into the fray.

How do you take one of 2015's most successful and fan-favorite games and improve on it for a sequel? Well, if you're Lego Dimensions, you just don't make a sequel. Instead, you spend all that time just adding to the formula that got the original incarnation of Lego Dimensions so much acclaim and attention. In addition to implementing some slight tweaks to the foundation you built less than a year ago, you go bigger and more outrageous with the content as well. Not only is Lego Dimensions bringing the same tested gameplay back, without the need for new portals or game discs, it's also adding a crazy number of new characters and worlds to the base game without skipping a beat.

Skylanders Superchargers is the latest iteration of the popular toy-to-game series coming out of Activision and Vicarious Visions. In addition to the 117 fully playable characters from the previous entries of Skylanders comes 20 new characters, some brand-new and some favorites re-imagined, for the new adventure in Superchargers. The most notable update is the inclusion of 20 new vehicles that bring road, water, and sky-based levels and travel to your battles against the villainous Kaos. Superchargers supplies a distinctly unique and refreshing change to the usual Skylanders game, though this adventure isn’t quite the entirely fine-tuned ride it set out to be.

While at first Lego Dimensions appeared to be yet another NFC figure game built to cash in on the success of Activision's Skylanders series, but in the months since it's been revealed to be a game built to cash in on Skylanders' success with some interesting improvements to the formula. With the concept of having to actually build all the figures and vehicles, Lego Dimensions offers enough difference from its competitors at the onset to make it appealing.
Factor in the inclusion of just about every license under Lego's belt, and you've got a game that lets you team Scooby-Doo and Batman with Doctor Who, while they try to stop an invasion into Springfield. After months of lead-up, the arrival of the ultimate fan fiction mash-up game is almost here.

For some, the only good part of the Star Wars prequel trilogy was the introduction of Darth Maul. A truly fearsome looking Sith, Maul had a sick dual lightsaber and a scowl made all the more imposing by his skin pigmentation. Despite only appearing in The Phantom Menace, the character achieved tremendous popularity, in part due to how under-utilized he was in the only film he ever appeared in. While not quite attaining Boba Fett levels of fandom, Darth Maul was the character from the prequel everyone wanted to be. Like Boba Fett, Maul, too, was resurrected posthumously in order to better serve the fandom in the expanded universe.
If you'd been watching The Clone Wars animated series, you'd know that Darth Maul was brought back during this trying time during the prequel timeline. Along with a branded bunch of Mandalorian warriors and his brother, Savage Opress, Maul returned late in the series to wreak more havoc on the Jedi forces and the Clone Army they commanded. Now the most feared foe returns once more in Disney Infinity 3.0's base game, Twilight of the Republic.